


(the early bird gets) The Worm

by greenapricot



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-12-04
Updated: 2004-12-04
Packaged: 2018-05-01 08:23:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5198924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenapricot/pseuds/greenapricot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It seems to Seamus that Blaise Zabini has been lurking in the shadows, dormant, for the better part of seven years, only to emerge mere months before they are to leave the castle for good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(the early bird gets) The Worm

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted in 2004. Takes place during 7th year but written before HBP, a time before Louis Cordice was cast as Blaise when my headcanon Blaise was played by a young Jonathan Rhys-Meyers.

It seems to Seamus that Blaise Zabini has been lurking in the shadows, dormant, for the better part of seven years, only to emerge mere months before they are to leave the castle for good. Suddenly there's no getting away from him. He's in the library, in the Great Hall, down by the lake, in Hogsmeade. Seamus has even run across (and nearly into) Blaise standing — half lurking, half well rehearsed nonchalant waiting — late at night, in corridors that are short-cuts only to the Gryffindor common room. 

Blaise seems, at times, to be everywhere all at once; a one-Slytherin swarm, like some sort of giant mad black locust.

:::

When a fat wriggling worm, held by fingers that might have been considered elegant if they hadn't been slightly too long, materializes between Seamus and his notes, he does his best to ignore it.

"Early bird gets the worm. Eh, Finnigan?" 

Seamus continues trying to decipher the bits of his own untidy scrawl not obscured by worm and doesn't look up. "You can have it." 

Blaise grins and drops the wriggling thing into his mouth. Seamus doesn't watch to see if Blaise just swallows or chews first, keeping his eyes to the parchment until Blaise has settled in on the bench. When he finally looks up the deep blue gaze he meets is far more intense than usual.

"What was that about?"

"Got to be prepared, you know. When the apocalypse comes we'll all be eating worms."

Seamus raises an eyebrow. "Apocalypse?"

"The end of the world."

"I know what apocalypse means."

"Then you ought to be more worried than you look."

"I'll take that under advisement."

"You should take it under active participation is what you should do." Blaise pokes Seamus in the chest as if that will spur him into action and Seamus grabs the finger to keep it from getting any closer.

"Has anyone ever told you that you're mad?"

Blaise considers. "Maybe once or twice." He leans in too close watching Seamus intently. "Why?"

"Oh, just—" Seamus suddenly realizes that he is still half-holding Blaise's hand and pushes it away, "curious." He turns with faux interest back to his notes missing the smile that creeps across Blaise's lips, like poison, as he walks out.

:::

Strangely, Seamus is beginning to get used to Blaise's presence, beginning to expect the sight of too blue eyes, nearly obscured by dark hair, watching him from the nook just to the left of the main staircase. Starting to grow accustomed to the sensation of being watched by someone he knows is there but can't quite see as he pushes his way through the crowded Charms corridor on a Thursday. Beginning to half look forward to the Slytherin's odd early morning pronouncements and interruptions.

Seamus can't remember exactly when it was that Blaise started talking an interest in him. The day, or week even, that Blaise first appeared on the opposite side of the Gryffindor table as Seamus was settling in for some pre-breakfast revising. Nor can he remember when the intrusions increased in frequency to the point when they became common place. Blaise and his irritatingly Slytherin lack of respect for other's personal space crept in slowly, barely noticeable; the first few dirty fingerprints on a white wall only to be followed by a few more, and a few more until the entire wall is covered and it seems it's always been that way.

Yes, Blaise is (at least) fly buzzing in the ear irritating but what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Right?

:::

A black clad body slides onto the bench next to Seamus, thigh to thigh. Arm jostles arm as he's trying to write. In his annoyance he neglects to lift his quill from the parchment and ink pools in a vaguely squid-shaped pattern obscuring the last word he's written as he looks up at the intruder.

Blaise holds out his hand for inspection, palm down. “My hands are filthy." 

Seamus notes the dirt caked under the nails, and thinks it very uncharacteristic — both the dirt and Blaise's very obvious ploy to get him to ask why — but doesn't rise to the bait. Blaise scowls and Seamus wonders idly if the dirt has somehow affected Blaise's brain function. 

He decides that it undoubtedly has when Blaise suddenly bolts for the door upending the entire ink bottle onto Seamus' parchment in the process.

:::

There is no real reason why Seamus needs to revise in the Great Hall. If he really wanted to get away from Blaise he could sequester himself in his dorm or take up residence in the common room with his house mates. Though the common room, while seemingly a favored revising location, is hardly conducive to actually getting anything done before night begins its slow slide into day.

In Seamus' opinion it is a near amazing feat that anyone has ever managed to focus on revising in the swirling red-gold noise of late evening in the common room. He prefers (despite the increasingly less than occasional intrusions) the gentle grey quiet of early mornings in the Great Hall where he can watch the sunrise colors move across his parchment as the enchanted ceiling fades from grey to orange.

It gives him a feeling of getting the jump on everyone else, the sense that he will be somehow more prepared in the event of an emergency (though he is lately beginning to think that any emergency in the near future will be Blaise related), accomplishing things before the majority of the castle has even begun to stir in their beds. It's like being alone, but not, and it's comforting; though Seamus suspects that many of his fellow Gryffindors (especially those who do study in the common room) would think it lonely. 

The few other students who haunt the edges of the Great Hall in the early hours tend not to bother each other. They don't talk amongst themselves until the bleary eyed masses start to filter in and the day catches up with them. All except the lone Slytherin, that is.

:::

Blaise deposits a sad excuse for an axe — complete with rotten handle — on the table next to him as he sits down opposite Seamus fixing him with a penetrating gaze. “Time we buried the hatchet, don't you think?"

Seamus considers ignoring him completely until Blaise begins drumming his fingers on the table in loud staccato. As usual he wants something. Seamus doesn't have even half a clue what that may be. 

Blaise seems to have discovered the not-rhythm most likely to annoy in the shortest span of time. 

“Look," Seamus says. Blaise stops tapping and looks at him in mock interest. “I don't know what N.E.W.T.s you're taking but those _I_ am require quite a bit of revising. Which is why I'm here. Revising. So kindly take your cliches and mad Slytherin traditions or whatever this is and. Piss. Off."

Blaise looks affronted as he grabs the axe by the blade — the handle shedding bits of wood and mould all over Seamus' Transfiguration notes — and stalks out.

:::

If absence makes the heart grow fonder how can it also be said that proximity breeds love? And wouldn't it make more sense that absence would make the heart forget and proximity bred animosity. Or maybe that was how it went. And breed and love seem somehow incongruous pushed together like that, breed is a word for raising sheep or chickens or those useless yippy pure-bred dogs. Love seems like it should be something more, not that love is something Seamus at seventeen has spent a whole lot of time pondering. Lust on the other hand.

Fabric brushes against his arm and Seamus nearly jumps out of his seat. He half-tries to recount how he managed to get from History of Magic and the missing years of Algolar the Unfortunate to cliches and lust and coiling snake doodles on the parchment in front of him before he remembers that yes, History of Magic is excruciatingly boring. Anything is more interesting then History of Magic, and revising for History of Magic, well—

“Tea?" 

Seamus shrugs in response and Blaise fills his cup. He doesn't stop to wonder why he is suddenly being offered refreshment instead of irritation until after he's drunk half the cup. By that point it's too late.

Seamus looks up at Blaise, who is standing over him with an air of great accomplishment arms crossed and teapot still held lightly in his right hand, and finds that he has trouble focusing. Blaise flashes him a blurry smirk. It is not at all reassuring.

“W-What did you do?"

“That's for me to know and you to find out."

“When?"

“Outside."

“But that's–"

“Shut up." 

Blaise prods Seamus in the back with the teapot and pushes him in the direction of the door. The lone student at the Ravenclaw table makes a great show of pretending not to watch.

Seamus follows Blaise onto the dewy grounds. The pearls of moisture that adorn each blade of grass quickly attach themselves to his shoes and his feet are shortly feeling distinctly damp. Everything — the mountains, the grass, the sky — is shrouded in an odd sort of mist; all the colors seem muted but at the same time more vivid as if he's suddenly acquired the ability to see a whole new spectrum of light. Seamus wonders if it's actually the mist that causes the effect or whatever it is that Blaise put in the tea.

Seamus is sure he ought to recognize the uneven stone lined path Blaise leads him down, but he doesn't. His legs move a bit too slowly and the ground, or his feet, feel spongy; rather like both his legs are half asleep. When he smacks his shin on a rock hard enough to send the rock toppling down the hill in front of him — barely missing Blaise's ankle on the way by — the pain is strangely dull like it is happening to someone else.

The small shed (or shack maybe) nestled at the edge of the forest, the crumbling door of which Blaise unceremoniously pushes Seamus through, has seen better days. There is a bed in the corner that looks as if it has been made out of pine boughs, a large quantity of dirt and pine needles covering the floor, and not much else. 

Blaise points to the bed. “Sit." 

Seamus complies without even realizing he has. Blaise settles in on the floor in the far corner of the shed. And watches, unblinking. Seamus' legs and arms are now feeling quite numb. Somewhere beyond the haze of misty odd color this bothers him but not quite as much as the dark blue gaze.

“What are you doing?" Seamus tries, and fails, to keep the exasperation from his voice sure that Blaise will somehow use it against him. “What's this about? What are you waiting for?" Blaise continues to stare at Seamus as if he's a kettle that ought to soon boil. “What the fuck? Answer me. Why am I here?"

“That is the eternal question, isn't it?"

“It's not the one I want an answer to though." Seamus grits his teeth, they feel fuzzy. “What. Are. You. Doing?"

Blaise shrugs, “Waiting."

“Well I'll wait elsewhere then. If you don't mind." Seamus tries to stand (and leave) only to discover that his arms and legs don't seem to be working properly and instead just manages to half flop over on the bed ending up with pine needles stuck to his cheek. “What the fuck, Zabini. Did you put a binding spell on me? Is this to do with the tea?"

Blaise turns his head, a bird sizing up prey, and continues to watch.

“Does this have something to do with all that apocalypse talk the other day?"

Silence.

“Do you really think you're going to get away with this?"

Silence.

Just as Seamus is considering (with the last shred of illusion that he has any control over the situation) that he may well just have to wait the Blaise out, he crosses the room and tries to poke Seamus in the ribs with his wand. Seamus manages to clumsily half push the wand away. He can almost feel the wood beneath his fingers. 

Blaise grimaces like a doctor who's patient is acting up. “Your hand-eye coordination should be nearly non-existent this long after administering." He taps his wand irritably against his elbow. “Your reflexes should be slowing rapidly at this point. You should be getting less coherent, not more. This is unacceptable."

“Don't you think you're taking this a bit too far?" Seamus asks blinking hard to keep his eyes open.

The look on Blaise's face says that he hadn't even considered that to be a possibility. “Taking what too far?"

“I tell you to ‘piss off' and next day you poison me. Isn't that a bit much?" 

“Oh," Blaise waves his hand lazily in the Seamus' direction “this doesn't have anything to do with that. I was going to do this regardless. Besides, it's not poison. If it were poison you'd already be dead."

Seamus does his best not sway side to side in time with Blaise's tapping wand. “That doesn't make me feel any better."

Blaise shrugs again and sits back down in the corner dark hair and cloak fading into the shadows until he is barely more than a disembodied face from Seamus' perspective. 

In the quiet the descends after Blaise returns to the corner Seamus can feel a low tingling hum just out of his range of hearing. Despite his best efforts not to he can't help but wonder if it's a harbinger of doom, if there will be permanent damage to his faculties once everything is back to normal.

Everything seems a bit dull around the edges, a bit fuzzy, as if the rest of the world, the other side of the room, is very far away. And, though thought and speech are still possible at a normal rate Seamus' body seems to be on another plane of existence all together (or maybe it's his brain that is). Every time he moves, or tries to move rather, he is hit with a dull unplaceable ache and he can't tell if it's really an ache or if the feeling even exists at all. 

He's overreacting he knows. He tells himself that this is all most likely some sort of N.E.W.T. stress induced hallucination (which actually doesn't make it all that much better) and it will all be over soon. But something about his inability to stand properly and kick things makes it difficult to accept, or deal with.

:::

He must have fallen asleep because the next thing Seamus knows it is dark (or near as he can tell it is through the one small grimy window). Blaise is sitting at the table (funny Seamus didn't remember there being a table) at the far side of the room prodding a glass vial that's hovering over what looks like to be Bunsen burner. The artificially too-orange glow of the flames makes the shed feel oddly comforting and Seamus feel strangely calm despite the fact that a horrible pins-and-needles tingle shoots through his arms and legs with every breath. He tries to move without moving to get a closer look at what Blaise is doing. Pine needles shush to the floor as he shifts on the bed and Seamus hasn't even manage get one foot solidly on the floor before Blaise raises his arm and points a finger at him without turning around.

“Stay where you are, Finnigan. This step is vitally important and I can't have you mucking it up with Gryffindor brashness."

Seamus snorts. “Gryffindor brashness, what about Slytherin arrogance?" There is a small pop from the vial and the liquid turns first acid purple then dull grey. Blaise grabs the vial and hurls it at the wall — it smashes with a hiss and a cloud of violent magenta smoke — in one motion before turning to Seamus.

“Look, I normally try to keep my associations with those of your ilk to the bare minimum. So I sugges—"

“You're not doing a very good job of it then are you? Bringing me down here. You're going to have to associate with me if I'm in your little hideout." 

“It's not a hideout. It's a," Blaise glances quickly at the crumbling ceiling, “bomb shelter."

“You really are mad, aren't you?" Blaise shrugs at the question and starts stacking the parchment strewn all over the table in semi-neat piles. When he turns around Seamus is watching him expectantly, half scared, half something else entirely.

“If you must know," Blaise begins, "it was meant to be a sleeping potion, something akin to the draught of the living dead, for my independent study in Potions. It obviously isn't working properly though, or you wouldn't still be talking. Or sitting up. Or—"

“I get the idea." Seamus is almost disappointed and the mostly innocuous motive for Blaise's actions. Not that it had comforted him any when he'd been sure it was some sort of sinister Slytherin plot but, well, that had made sense at least. This wasn't sinister, only annoying, and Blaise was continuing on about the potion as if Seamus had a care for the thing at all beyond its immediate affect on him.

“It would have been brilliant. It could have got me a write up in the best potions journals." Blaise leans against the table, his attention focused somewhere on the dirty wall over Seamus' head. He looks almost wistful. "There would have been awards and acclaim, seven course dinners, champagne flowing like water into every glass, world recognition, invitations to the most exclusive parties, grand award ceremonies with ice sculptures of epic proportion..." 

Seamus can see that Blaise is likely to continue on in this vein indefinitely if he doesn't do something. He stands, grabbing a handful of pine needles from the bed, and throws them in the Blaise's direction. They don't quite reach their mark but he is pleased to find that his arms and legs respond, for the most part, the way they ought to.

Blaise stops talking, one hand in the air mid-ice-sculpture-height demonstration and looks at Seamus as though he'd nearly forgot there was someone else in the shack. "Oh," he says.

"Yes," Seamus answers, wondering if perhaps Blaise has been administering potions to himself as well, the schizophrenic prat. “But why experiment on me? Why not a Slytherin first year who already thinks of you as a god and wouldn't even put up a fight." 

“I would never experiment on a member of my own house." Blaise says with a very Slytherin indignant snort.

“Okay, a Hufflepuff then."

“Wouldn't be much of a challenge, would it?"

Seamus considers. “‘Spose not."

Blaise looks pleased with himself, the sort of pleased that is likely to be bad news for Seamus. “I knew there was more to you than the average Gryffindor."

“What's that supposed to mean? Did you actually think I'd go along with your mad plan?"

“Of course not. If I had I wouldn't have gone to the trouble of making an odorless potion to add to the tea."

Seamus rolls his eyes. “Oh, so sorry you had to expend extra effort to experiment on me against my will."

Blaise shrugs and turns back to his parchment. “We all have to make sacrifices," he says. 

Seamus half-stumbles half-hurls himself at Blaise's retreating back (possibly not the best course of action in his semi-mobile state) his fist catching Blaise just below the right ear. Blaise turns, more quickly that Seamus thinks ought to be allowed, and has Seamus on the floor, flat on his back, arms above his head, before he can land another ill-advised and ill-aimed punch. His head hits the floor _hard_ and Blaise is a shadow thing on top of him viewed through bursts of bright color that aren't there.

"Didn't I tell you to stay where you were." Blaise growls. 

Seamus twists and rolls — or at least makes a valiant effort to do so — but he can't wriggle out of Blaise's fingernails-biting-into-wrist grip. Blaise is stronger that he looks, all sneer and threat and scowl and surprisingly warm weight on top of him. Seamus thinks Blaise may be overreacting a tad, but then again he did hit him. Sort of. But as Blaise leans in close, too close, and hisses "I'd been wondering if it would come to this," in Seamus' ear — hot breath trailing down his neck like treacle — he can on longer remember why. 

It takes Seamus nearly thirty seconds of full on eyes-barely-a-foot-from-his-own Blaise glare to form the thought that he'd be able to get out of this for sure if it weren't for the bloody potion. That is what he wants, yes, to get out of this. He doesn't want to cant his hips up, pressing his body against the weight on top of him. He certainly doesn't want to elicit a surprised hiss from Blaise that quickly turns to a moan from Seamus' own lips as Blaise pushes back. But strangely it seems that he has, and Seamus tries not grin at the reaction. 

He tries even harder not to let the moan rumbling in the back of his throat escape as Blaise presses his own hips down again, followed by hands trailing chest to waistband and under. With the surprise and warmth of hand a on his cock Seamus doesn't notice that his own hands are now free, his assured escape obscured by hot breath and tongue and lips (and the barest hint of teeth). Heat trailing up his spine and a garbled half-animal cry that seems to have issued from his own mouth. 

There's not enough air in the room, his breath coming in fits and gasps, and _fuck holyfuck. Yes._ His hands scrabbling for purchase on the dirty floor. And possibly he's hit his head again — though he didn't feel it — the bursts of color back again blossoming behind his closed eyes.

 

Blaise grins, slow and devious, licking his lips. He then stands, grabbing a stack of parchment from the table and heads for the door, leaving Seamus sprawled on the floor trousers open, a fine film of dust settling over the room now that everything is still. 

Blaise mutters something that sounds a whole lot like "Let that be a lesson to you," as the door swings shuts behind him, narrowly missing the top of Seamus' head. Seamus can't fathom what the lesson might be.

"Quite obviously mad." Seamus mumbles to himself. Even he's not sure if he means Blaise or himself.


End file.
